blues people

When I opened the door, the sound of the guitar grabbed me by the neck, reached into my soul and never let go. There are few things in this world as wild, primitive, or powerful as the blues guitar. In the hands of a master of music, the guitar screams and screams; cries and howls; moans and howls; yell and yell. Blues guitar can reach out and rip the soul out of your body.

The blues is an emotional art form. It is a musical style born in the heart and sung directly from the soul. Blues singers run the gamut of the emotional spectrum. Capturing the full range of the human experience. Blues musicians sing about heartache and heartbreak, lust and love, betrayal and rage, hope and happiness. But at its best, the blues is about redemption. It’s a feeling that can cut you at the knees or inspire you to stand on your own two feet. And that was blues music for me: the soundtrack of my redemption. In the words of Howling Wolf, “The Blues can fill you with a deep pain that hurts so much you wish you were dead, or it can make you fall in love too.”

And that’s exactly what the blues did for me. He gave me the confidence to stand tall; it connected me with my people; and helped me sing my song and add it to the rich tapestry of black American art.
So when I walked into The River Street Jazz Club almost ten years ago, I had no idea that I was walking into my collective past and into my individual future.

Growing up in a litter of five, my sister and I were the only children of color. In fact, my sister was the only other blackface I had ever seen until I was in my teens. My mother was a small, lily-white woman with dark hair and large brown eyes. Sadly, she was also an uneducated, spiteful racist with a deep hatred for black music, black art, and black people. My mother had many house rules. One of those rules was absolutely no music, especially black music, in the home or on the car radio. On the rare occasions that I broke the rule, my mother would stampede into the living room and look directly into my childish eyes.

Lowering his voice an octave, his breath reeking of mayonnaise and kielbasa, he growled sternly, “Son, stay away from those blacks.” With a viper’s tongue and dripping with venom, he whispered hoarsely, “They will cut your throat and stab you in the back when you least expect it.” Then, as a final chorus, in a voice an octave higher, he’d add, “Now turn off that damn black music and get out of my sight!”
But when I walked through the rusty steel gate on a Tuesday, at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, I was, forever, leaving it all behind.

Oddly enough, a white French-Canadian poet and outlaw American writer named Jack Kerouac helped guide me through the prison of my past to the freedom of my future. I was a young man and curious about everything. I had been reading about beat writers and was passionate about the whole thing. He was crazy about the world and crazy about life. He was crazy about art and books; I was passionate about poetry and music. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deeply and extract all the marrow of life.” For black men in America, our history, our language, and our music are our proverbial “forests.” When I walked into a smoky, ritzy joint in Plains, Pennsylvania called The River Street Jazz Club, I was walking toward nature. I was rediscovering a part of my town long lost in American culture.

Historically speaking, being born black in America has few social advantages, but blues music is one of our rare cultural heritages. The Blues is a testimony to our suffering. It is a means of “bearing witness” to the atrocities of our origins in America. And beyond that, the Blues “bears witness” to the human soul, from the depths of greed and lust, to the heights of love and kindness. There was, and always will be, a part of me inherently drawn to the struggles and triumphs of the oppressed, and make no mistake about it; the blues is an art form created by the downtrodden and dispossessed in America.

It was a Tuesday night, open mic night, at The River Street Jazz Club, and the club was mostly empty. The few bosses there were upper-class, well-dressed, middle-aged white men. But I didn’t care. He wasn’t there for the crowd or even the girls. It was curiosity that led me there. It was my people screaming through the heavy din of history that compelled me to go. It was fate that brought me to the audience on that very special night.

I was lucky to get into an exceptional set. Although there were only a handful of regulars in the audience, local blues legend Clarence Spady played as if possessed by the devil himself. Clarence is a petite, middle-aged, dark-skinned black man from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Once hailed as “the future of the blues”, he is also one of the “badest guitarists” on the planet. His father was a legendary blues guitarist, and were it not for his disgusting heroin addiction, Clarence Spady’s name would be synonymous with the blues. He would be up there with BB King, Buddy Guy and Muddy Waters.

That night, the Clarence Spady Trio took us all on an exciting journey through blues history. From his origins in the Mississippi Delta, he performed songs like “Dust My Broom” and “Illinois Blues.” I sat there, jaw dropping and mesmerized, as he covered uptown Chicago rhythm and blues hits like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Spoonfull.” He even played grease-dripping funk classics like “Cissy Strut” and “Pick Up the Pieces” before ending the set with a faithful Hendrix rendition of “Little Wing.”

I had never seen or heard anything like this in my life. Her fingers flew over the guitar like a force of nature. Truly, the man was a hurricane on six strings: pure, raw, primal energy. But there was one song in particular that stuck with me over the years: a Robert Johnson cover titled “Crossroads Blues.”

Robert Johnson is a legend, a Faustian myth in the yearbooks of blues history. As a young man, Johnson would hang out at juke joints and honkey-tonks admiring established bluesmen like Son House and Charlie Patton. At that time, young Robert Johnson could not be left for dead. He just sat there admiring his heroes. When the guitar reached Johnson’s hands, the other musicians left the room because Robert sounded like a cat howling. Then one day, the story goes, Robert walked in, sat down, and wowed the crowd with his supernatural performance. He eliminated legendary musicians Son House and Charlie Patton from the stage. The new king of blues had arrived and a legend was born. But Johnson left almost as soon as he arrived. Dying on all fours, barking and howling like a rabid dog, Johnson was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his supernatural guitar skills.

Robert Johnson wrote “Crossroad Blues” at the age of twenty. Most people think the song is about him dealing with the devil, but for me, that night, it took on a completely different meaning. Johnson tells the story of a lonely and scared black man walking down a dark road late at night. He writes, “I went down to the crossroads and fell to my knees. I went down to the crossroads and fell to my knees.” As Clarence sang the opening lines, I knew that the lonely and scared black man was me, and I also realized that the music of my people and their history was my lonely and dark path.

The second verse begins with one of the saddest lines ever written in the language of the blues. Johnson writes, “Mmmm, the sun is going down, boy, the dark will catch me here. Oooo, eeee, boy, the darkness will catch me here. I don’t have any sweet loving women to love and care for.” It’s the same kind of loneliness I’ve lived with all my life: a deep, deep sadness that permeates from the pit of my stomach to the bottom of my soul. It was the kind of loneliness that took me from home to The River Street Jazz Club on a lonely Tuesday night.

I wish I could tell you that “Crossroad Blues” ends happily. It doesn’t. But I can happily report that my story does.

Listening to the Blues for the first time was like finding religion. I sat alone in the club, white-knuckled and drenched in sweat. I knew right then and there that I would have a guitar. In fact, I knew I’d die if I didn’t, so I canceled work the next day and searched local pawn shops until I found the guitar that felt perfect: a worn, fat-bodied Yamaha acoustic. . Guitar in hand, I threw two hundred and fifty dollars (to hell with the rent!) on the counter and walked out of the pawn shop into the rest of my life.

I’ve owned a handful of guitars, played hundreds of shows, and discovered countless guitarists over the years, but there will always be an empty seat in the bar of my heart for Clarence Spady and the gifts he gave me that night: a lifetime. . love affair with the blues and a visceral connection to my heritage and my people, the blues people.